Certain natural languages have been regarded as an impediment to cognitive development and intellectual performance. Evaluative comparison of languages uses such criteria as euphony, articulatory ease, economy, disambiguity of lexical items, learnability etc., all of which have been exploited for unexpressed ideological purposes. So-called primitive languages are relinquished not because of their structural insufficiencies but because of the social discrimination directed towards their speakers and because, as a consequence, they do not provide practicable means of social progress.